Under Orders: The Story of a Young Reporter

The Manning family has collapsed into crisis. Myles's father has gone blind, the income has dried up, and the young man who expected to finish college and enter a respectable profession must now abandon his studies and find work immediately. The job he takes is one he once would have scorned: reporter for a New York daily paper. His first day on the job throws him into the chaos of a streetcar strike, where violence erupts on the streets and a reporter's work becomes genuinely dangerous. With the guidance of his new friend Van Cleef, Myles learns to navigate a world of rough colleagues, tight deadlines, and moral ambiguity, all while carrying the weight of his family's hopes on his shoulders. Munroe, who worked as a reporter for the New York Sun in his twenties before becoming an editor, writes with the authority of firsthand experience. This is a story about proving yourself not through inherited status but through labor, about duty to family, and about the unglamorous unglamorous road to becoming a man.